From: Michael Slater <slater@...>
Date: 2003-08-29T14:59:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Why would you abandon Ruby? (was)

> From: Avi Bryant [mailto:avi@beta4.com]

> I said HotSpot was "derived from Self".  The full story, as I
> understand it, is somewhat longer: some of the Self team left Sun to
> form Animorphic Systems, with the aim of building a commercial
> Smalltalk product - Strongtalk - that built on the optimization
> techniques from Self.  Animorphic was also known as, or was a
> subsidiary, of Longview - so when Sun bought Longview they were
> effectively buying the Strongtalk VM.  This was retargeted to Java
> (though before or after the buyout I don't know), and became HotSpot.
> 
> There's some more info on this in [ruby-talk:22865] if you're
> interested.

From what you've written, "derived" it certainly is. Thanks for the
genealogy. It seems like it's a long tangled web leading from class-less
Smalltalk to Sun's incorporation of HotSpot into Java. I will check out the
old thread / message you mentioned.

In what I've found so far, it's a fascinating story --
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/projects/strongtalk/pages/history.html

I was working at an ISV partner of Microsoft at the time of the Sun
acquisition of Longview. Microsoft had passed on Longview basically saying
that the technology wasn't anything useful/special. I can see more clearly
why it might have been a bad match for Microsoft and why it took Sun so long
to get HotSpot to work well for Java.

--ms